The Elephant Parade

The Elephant Parade is an open air art exhibition of life size models of elephants held for the preservation of the Asian elephant. Held in the streets of Holland, Belgium and London over the years, the Elephant Parade has raised millions of Euros for the Elephant Family charity- which is working with the Wildlife trust of India in preserving the Asian elephant. The Elephant Family claims that if the current trend continues, the Asian elephant will cease to exist in the wild by 2050. You can find more information on them here and you can join them on Facebook here.

Here are a few of the life-size elephant sculptures that were auctioned to raise money over the years.

Mythili Thevendrampillai's 21st Century Ganesh from the 2010 parade held in London

There is a Goddess Saraswati image painted on the other side, but I couldn't get a decent image of it.

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The one below is from London 2010, titled Cha-Chang reminded me of Indian Kalamkari and Batik work. What do you think?

Aptly titled Bali

 I loved this one with a very evocative 'Stop sign', titled Dead End by artist Kriti Arora for the 2010 parade in London

Its hard to pick a favourite, but this one with the lotus paintings on the feet and random devanagri script letters strewn about comes close to topping the list. Titled 'Aum' by artist van Vliet Inger, for Amsterdam 2009.

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'Suraj' by HH Maharaja Ranjitsinh Gaekwad of Baroda

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'Hathi' by Manish Arora

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 As I have SO many favourites, I'm going to present collages instead of going into the details. Too many that I liked!

L to R: Barcode; The very beautifully titled 'Colorfiul Hope'; An intricate depiction of Amsterdam-Dam and CSK- Sorry non-chennaites had to throw this one in as it supports both Chennai Super Kings and Elephants in one swoop :)

L to R: Isaac Mizrahi's Candy(Eye candy for sure!); Eli Krishna- this one is a favourite too; Fish n Chips- I loved the newspaper detailing and Fatima- this reminded me of a Kashmiri papier-mache box sitting on my dresser.

If you would like to spend an afternoon or lazy weekend looking through more of these lovely sculptures, you can find them here.

Apparently, one can buy miniature versions of these sculptures. I'm not really sure where they are available though. I have written to Elephant Family requesting for details, and I'll keep you posted on their reply. I can't afford to but a 6000 pounds sculpture but would still like to contribute to aiding the preservation of Asian elephants by at least buying the miniatures and I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way!

Have a lovely weekend! And do check back next week for more Artist Profiles that have been sitting in my inbox for a while now.

All images credit to the Elephant Parade.